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I will not be broken.  Too sick coughing to sleep, oh well.  All alone this day before Christmas, tomorrow, too – so what?  I have nowhere to go anyway, and I am not going to take this cold flu bug out of the house to infect someone else.  So here I am up long before dawn.  I must be feeling better after a week of being knocked flat with this thing because I can feel a little bit of FIGHT coming back to me.

Lying in bed hoping to sleep coughing hard all night has not been a whole lot of fun.  But this has been necessary.  There is no way to get this crap out of my chest before it heads into infection except to be able to cough it out.

As I lay there I saw a huge high arched ceilinged chamber with a heavy iron barred cage suspended high above the floor from massive chains.  Inside?  My Writer Within.  I am feeding her reality honed from hardship.  I am working to give her full permission to say exactly what she needs to say once I let her out, once she is fully grown, once I am ready down here to let her tell a story that belongs in that book I NEED to write.

As I lay there and wondered about the large raw bones dripping with sinew from some ancient beast I am feeding her to gnaw her teeth sharp upon I began to hear the music.  I jumped out of the confines of that stupid bed that has no intention of seeing me slumber upon it.  Donning my down parka (it is cold in this house, cold outside, too meager the funds needed to keep it warm when it lacks insulation) I uncovered my keyboard and began to play those notes.  Those notes.  Those notes.

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A few minutes before I saw my Writer Within growing fighting strong and tough within that hanging cage I found myself wandering in wondering through different lives that perhaps I could be living at this moment in time had something — perhaps a whole lot of somethings — gone so differently in my childhood.

Always when this kind of wandering happens there are loved ones, family, friends and even needy strangers surrounding me in a large and comfortable architecturally intriguing and warmly enchanting villa of a house I live in.  Always I am professionally happy.  I am healthy, fit in all ways and my spirit rests knowing all is well with the world.

I do not find myself in those wandering wondering moments sick alone in a cold house on a holiday weekend.  Yet this is exactly where I am.  For whatever reason, reasons have brought me here.

A week ago my daughter brought my 21-month-old grandson down the 1700 miles to visit for a week.  Baby brought the bug.  The visit was all it could be.  Then they went home.

I was not prepared for the depths of my sadness that settled in every cell of my being once the little angel was gone.  Overwhelming heartsick!  I sunk below those waves.  My immune system said, “I will fight no more” and BAM!  Here I am sick — not surprisingly so.

Cold alone and sick on the holidays.  But I whined this whine already.

Where is the goodness in this?  I turn to God with prayer to have my sadness dispelled, my difficulties removed.  I pray to be shown ‘the way’…..

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In between all of this last week I communicated with the 85-year-old woman who I discovered again in very recent years who used to be our family’s neighbor during the Alaskan homesteading years of my childhood.  This woman generously offered to write some of her memories about my mother, difficult to do because Mother brought no joy to anyone.  In her vast sickness, she could not.

I had hoped for a written letter of confirmation about what Mother looked like to outsiders to our family that I could include in the back of my book as affirmation of some sort that all was not well with the Lloyd family.  By the end of her reminiscing this woman was expressing — what?  Guilt for speaking ill of the dead?  Pity?  Shame at herself for daring to call a dangerous crazy woman less than perfect?

I return-emailed the first 2 chapters of my (and my daughter’s) book back to her — along with a sense of empowerment growing in my belly as I wrote that I wish to address in this book the issue of why NOBODY ever saw what was happening to me at my mother’s hand (with my father’s complicity).

I wrote that I hold society responsible for allowing those 18 years of insane horrific abuse to happen to me.

I guess that would include this neighbor.

I have not heard back from her.

I will not retract my words.

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So spoken, do I have the GUTS to write my own story from inside of that hell without cowering or stalling or mincing or skipping what has to be told?

Do I DARE to write the truth?

That Writer Within being fed mastodon bones in her cage.  She is sharpening her own teeth into fangs.  She needs to sharpen her nails into claws.  She has to build muscled power of her own.  She is going to do this writing I need her to do — and she has to do that writing — ALONE.

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I cannot see leaving my home in the Arizona high desert to return to live in North Dakota where my grandson resides.  Long story there, but the best choice is to finish and publish this book so that I will have the money I need to freely travel there to visit.

This heartsickness of mine — I want to turn it into something else, something healing, something helpful, something far more real than misery.  I am asking to transform.

No doubt will write this book.  No worry about how it will sound to anyone else or what anyone will think about what I say will write this book, either.  There is nobody but my own self and God that I can tell this tale to rightfully.  There is no other way it can be told but straight out of the both barrels, straight out of the gate as I write as hard and as fast and as truly as I can as if I am still running for my very life.

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Two months ago I stopped the book writing because the misery of my story was crushing me.  That will not do.  If it takes the one powerful thought that in this book and its selling lies my own great hope of freedom to travel to see my loved ones who live in places I cannot reside, so be it.

I will toughen myself up for this work.  Resolve.  Determination.  Talent.  Hope.  Belief in my right to do this work and in this work’s rightness CAN carry me forward.  I set myself a deadline to get myself in order for this task by the first week of this upcoming new year.  As hard as these days of journeying may be right now, I am moving in that direction.

Bows and tinsel and merrymaking with company is not a part of this task for me, so it seems.  Getting myself strong and ready to do battle with human evil as it found its way into my mother so that she could do what she did to me — is.

And if this takes finding some more mastodon bones to force through the bars to fully toughen up my Writer Within to make her strong enough to accomplish this task I need her to do — believe me, I will find them.

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I see no possibility of individual healing without consideration for the generations in the past that suffered and for the generations in the future that we wish not to suffer.  In Native American Worldviews this is talked about in terms of the Seven Generations.

Below are some links about this Seventh Generation thinking.  The European heritages that are linked to the horrendous traumas inflicted upon the indigenous inhabitants of this vast blessed land are very comfortable in self-centered thinking.

Self-centered thinking is not a healing way of being in a body on this planet.

All life is linked both in injury and in health.

I cannot consider the massive traumas inflicted upon me from the time of my birth until I was ejected from my family of origin when I was 18 without thinking both about at least the seven generations that preceded me as the accumulated traumas and wounds of those generations found their way into our family home – or without thinking at least of the seven generations that are following me.

I will never know the life story of most of my ancestors, yet I value and work with everything I have found out about any of them.  I believe so-called ‘western’ ego-centric thinking very easily leads to sickness.  I believe consideration for the entire web of life we are a part of creates healing.

In order to personally become a prism for healing within my family I must allow my knowing to grow into a soul knowing which is far more expansive than the thinking of the mainstream culture of the nation in which I reside.  I must be aware not only of my relationship with all life at this present moment – I must recognize the prism of me at least as the center link with seven generations going backward and with seven generations going forward.

Even for those who have never suffered human-caused abuse and trauma, even for those who will never have children – our personal expanded healing work and thinking will impact all life.  We are not separated beings even if we think we are.

I am not afraid to try to make that stretch.  Are you?

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Ancestral Healing

Healing the Wounds of Your Ancestors

Our Responsibility to the Seventh Generation

America’s Forgotten Responsibility – The Seventh Generation – Native American Elder Prophecies

Seventh Generation Advisors

Pearls of Wisdom – The Seventh Generation

Video – For the Next Seven Generations – Grandmothers Speak

Seven Generations Sustainability

Native American Prophecy

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There is no chance that this very early morning post won’t be a rambling one because I am too intensely full of IT, whatever IT is — in part to be defined as I think my way in words through the very writing of this post.

Emotion.  I guess that’s what I guess about what I am so intensely full of right now.

I just had an image appear I am sure through my very imaginal right brain hemisphere that must nearly crystallize — or sum up — where I am at in this moment of time as I work my way through my life — as it most recently involves this family slide sorting process.  Speaking (as I did in a recent post) about the myth of Psyche, whose name originated the field of study called ‘psychology’ — Psyche heals herself and her Eros/passion in the myth — finds and reconnects with herself and her life — through a tedious, careful, studied exercise in sorting seeds.  Little tiny seeds.

I never anticipated that I would end up with a series of slide sorting posts — but here I am and here are you, dear readers, caught in mid slide smack in the middle of what on the surface ‘should’ have been a sorting exercise about little pieces of film stuck inside little squares of cardboard.

Nothing less.  Nothing more.  Seeds of time, of the passage of childhoods, caught inside material, tangible (far more than today’s fleeting digital glimpses of in-the-moment pictures) objects named slides.

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Psyche and I.  Sorting.  Sorting.

Deeply moving, deeply touching, deeply troubling slides of a traumatic childhood for all six of the Lloyd children — but nearly incomprehensibly so for one of those children.  Me.  The one doing this sorting.

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Alive.  I am alive.  I feel as if I am caught within a vaporous cloud of invisible, unshed but nearly shed tears.

Tears.

Behind the eyes tears.  Tears that once wept would keep on weeping — it seems forever, as if the tears are bottomless and forever tears.

The tears of unloved, rejected, hated, spurned, scorned and terribly terribly hurt little ones.

I having been one of those hated and hurt from the time I was born.

So what?

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Healing.

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My daughter living 1700 miles away from me will arrive the day after tomorrow with my almost 21-month old grandson (my only grandchild).

Even the most obvious level of this slide sorting is about that greatly anticipated week long visit.  The slides cannot remain piled upon this table here ready for little hands to play with.

My daughter’s most recent video of this little boy sent to me is very short — yet the hope of a species lies within its brief synapses of time.

Visiting a city park for a holiday season event.  There are two Clydesdale horses pulling a large wagon filled with happy people.

My grandson has books of all kinds read to him for 30 – 45 minutes at bedtime.  He has learned the pictures of animals.  His mommy teaches him the sounds they make, the sounds of each of their voices.

In this video a perfect little boy, pure and innocent as all little ones are, expresses with his voice his absolute thrill of amazement and comprehension as he repeats “NEIGH” over and over again with inflection, with joy, with amazement as he meets from a visual distance the first horses in their bodies in his lifetime.

There will never be another FIRST moment in his lifetime for meeting horses.

He is thrilled.  His family is thrilled WITH him and FOR him.  Those who love him not only recognize HIM in his life, but his EXPERIENCE of himself in his life.  Surrounded with love, this little boy’s safe and secure attachment to his caregivers and to himself is growing instant by instant into his safe and secure attachment into a VERY big world.

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How did I grow into the world never having anyone THRILL for me?

This is not a trite question about a mute point of endeavor.

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How did I grow into this world good enough that I could raise a daughter who can now become such an amazingly perfect mother?  Not that she or her husband will be able to respond perfectly in every moment of this little one’s childhood — but they have responded perfectly with perfect love that is being passed to their son with every breath (Psyche for ‘breath of life’) they all breath.

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I did find I think five slides of pictures of just me in those slides.  Visually I ended up with stacks of slides destined for each of my siblings that number in the hundreds that my logical self could not stop from recognizing as tangible ‘proof’ of the place I held in my mother’s abusive, mad universe.

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So, back to the beginning of this post when I mentioned an image fed to me this early morning by my very wise right brain hemisphere:  I am a prism.

I stand at a point in time processing my life and impacting others — to the positive.  If I can only let myself KNOW THIS FACT!

All the moving madness and mayhem in the Lloyd family as those six children grew up.  All the witnessing of insane, brutal abuse my siblings did watching what Mother did to me as Father allowed it to happen.

All the visual recording in those slides of Mother’s thrills in five of her children.

The absence of that thrill for me shown in the absence of love to me in these slides.

All in a jumble, these slide piles.  My task, my Psyche task, to sort them out — and hopefully with my baby sister’s help (I am 60, she is 56) when she comes to visit me next month, we can put these slides in exact order and title them by time and place so that each sibling has their first organized and ordered visual of their childhood.

As I have told my sister, I cannot do this final stage of this task alone.  I have the piles sorted.  I can mail them to a person in each of those families just as they are now.  That is something, at least, but I know it is not the completion of the task as I would like it to be done.

I wish the slides to be in acid free plastic sheet holders, all labeled, all in order.  I wish them to be placed within colorful little pocket folders.  I want this job done right.

Because I am the prism.

I am the one in this family through which generations of pain and sickness and hurt — of rage and of resulting evil actions — found their way to be focused on ME — from the time I was born.

All that darkness.  All that entangled mess of pictures of pure and innocent children.  Me.  Take the mess, filter it through the prism of my love, of my good intentions to help healing happen.  Run the dark mess through the prism so that something pure and beautiful and good comes out the other side — something — a story in pictures — passed not only to my siblings, but to the generations that are following us.

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And the process brings to me deep emotions — mostly great grief as far as I can tell.

Yet I carry the hope of healing as I carry a faith in a God that wants all life to be healthy and happy, that wants a world in order with its priorities straight.

There is a lot of time and labor still required of the main body on the family slides that I am keeping here while those piles of slides dedicated visually to each sibling finds their way down the line of time now into my siblings’ hands.

It is my intention and my hope, if I don’t get sidetracked and stopped by hopelessness and deep grief, to finish this task.  I wish to create a book for the family of the Alaskan homesteading era belonging to the Lloyd family tree.

I wish that story to be told somehow truthfully without skipping the part about the severe mental illness (future generations need to know of that risk) and without skipping the part about the unbelievable abuse that ran as a deep undercurrent under everything that ever happened in our family (directly caused by Mother’s mental illness).

But what I have worked so hard to learn in my own healing process as the chosen-for-abuse child is that Alaska offered to my so-sick Mother a chance to experience God’s grace.

It is God’s grace that I see in the homesteading story, a grace that surrounds all life all of the time — but that Mother could not access — except through her connection with that place on the mountain.

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Meanwhile, I have ten pictures of Mother in an envelope separated from the rest of all of these slides.

I have not decided what to do with them.

As I have recently written I am deeply involved in a process of staring down the snake-headed, turning-to-stone Medusa Mother of mine.

I can see Medusa when I look at all of these pictures.  Medusa took all of them — except the pictures here of HER.  What I see when I look at all these slides is what Medusa Mother saw as she snapped her camera’s shutter.  Medusa saved these pictures.  Medusa is gone.  What now of the history belonging to her offspring and to their offspring — and especially what happens to the pictures of HER?

This is important to me.  I cannot destroy or glibly let these pictures of Mother leave my possession until I make a very clear decision about their destiny — and about my interaction with their destiny — and my own.

There is a part of me that craves being able to stare Medusa-Mother down as I see her face in these pictures.  I had a different mother than my siblings did — beyond measure — different!

What I see when I look at that face in those pictures is what I avoid knowing.  There is another level there.  Can I let that terrible life-destroying darkness run through the prism of my soul so that what comes out the other side at the end of this process is beautiful light?

I turn to God as the only source of wisdom regarding this task.  I know, personally, oh how I KNOW what evil is.  The absence of goodness and the light of love inside Mother toward me — as it existed inside herself and projected totally out onto me — caused and continues to cause me enough suffering — and I will NOT pass that darkness forward.

Of all the alchemical processes God can do, turning darkness in human history into pure goodness of love is a miracle without measure.  But my experience is that this change does not happen without a whole lot of dedicated work on the side of the humans involved.

That this work HAS to involve emotions, deep and intense emotions, simply shows me that our BODY is fundamentally involved in this work.  This is not a ‘brain only’ healing process.  To do this work I have to feel, even though I often wish I didn’t.

And then I remember that the absolute JOY I will feel during this upcoming visit from my daughter and grandson would not be possible if my heart wasn’t equally open to sorrow and to the awe of pure love.  This is what being wholly human must be all about.

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I am still working my way through the project of sorting the family slides, trying to clear a table top buried under the disorganized heaps of old childhood memories before my daughter and 21-month-old grandson arrive for their visit this Saturday.

Nothing but completing at least the first stages of this task is going to make me feel any better.  For any denial I might still be holding onto about the truth of my singled-out-child for severe abuse of the six children in my family of origin, this slide sorting project is chopping out huge chunks of it.

So far I have found two slides of Linda only.  One faded picture is of me the summer before I turned 12 ‘on the way to camp’ (yes, the same one I stole the canoe at as written in previous post).  I know it was only because of Mother’s belief that she was doing something so good and so heroic by sending evil-child Linda to a week of Christian camp that this picture was taken at all.  I cannot fool myself into believing the picture had even a microscopic bit of love for me within it.

There is one other picture of me on my 18th birthday sitting alone on a couch.

In perspective I have sorted piles and piles and piles and piles of pictures taken of my other siblings in their starring roles as adored children of my parents.  Very many of these pictures have been duplicated so that there are piles more of repeats of each of my five siblings.

Any pictures other than the two mentioned in which I appear the picture was most often taken of my siblings at the same time my back appears in the picture or some tiny piece of me is barely visible in a corner of the picture.  Most all pictures of my siblings at play, parties and celebrations do not include me at all.  The same happens in several holiday pictures.  As I grew older I often appear in the background in or emerging from the kitchen with my apron on.

In many pictures that I do appear in I am off to the side of the ‘loving’ family group as the spurned outcast that I was.  Certainly I do not appear in one birthday party compared to the many for my siblings.  There are far more pictures of the family’s dogs over the years of my childhood in this slide collection than there are of me.

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I am sorting out the piles of sibling photographs to send to them individually.  I am finding the history of the family’s Alaskan homesteading history included in this mess, which pleases me.  I am also staring into the face of snake-headed Medusa Mother as I work my way through this project.

I cannot do this part of my work without feelings.  Grief!  Disgust, anger, sadness.

I am also amazed that I survived at all!  What appears as an indication of the lack of love for me in these slides is not showing the massive true reality of my childhood — the violent, brutal, abusive trauma — the HATRED that existed for me in place of love.  I must have been continually starving to DEATH for love, affection or affirmation of any kind.

But I am also finding myself thinking that nowhere in my own 18-year history of infant-child abuse did I really get a single clue about what love was.

I have no memories, as I have mentioned before, of envy or jealousy or self pity regarding the favoritism heaped upon my siblings.  I never had a chance to get to know myself in any different kind of world.  Reality was reality in our family — exactly as my severely abusive mentally ill mother determined it to be.  Nobody ever questioned her, certainly not I.

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I have heard it said that so-called ‘adult children’ are left ‘guessing what normal is’.  The matter is far more serious to me than this phrase might suggest, and includes for me a complete lack of understanding even about what love is.

I have done my best all of my life to be a good person, and to me that means being a loving person.  I let my three children each show me the way to what loving them was.  I call that ‘borrowed secure’ (rather than ‘earned secure’) attachment.

Where I end up suffering the most is not being able to know what adult relationship love is.  I seem to be able to love someone, but I have never chosen to love a man who has ever loved me back.

In addition, another big problem for me in my inability to really know what love is because I was hated for those 18 years of suffering and never loved at all, is that I don’t know what God’s love is or what it means to love God in return.

I am gaining clues — but I struggle.  I am hoping God understands how terribly difficult my first years of my life were and cares about those failed and brutal attachment relationships set me back what feels like a million lifetimes in being able to understand the most important love relationship of a person’s life here on earth.

I believe that a well loved and well cared for infant-child learns what love is by how it is treated in the very first months and years of its lifetime.  Love builds its body-brain.

If such a child is also fortunate enough to be taught about God’s love and love for God right along with being taught about love within its family, I can’t conceive of that little person growing into adulthood with the same kinds of limitations about love that I (and perhaps other severe early abuse survivors) have.

To be invested in this lifetime with love for God must allow a person to have their priorities absolutely straight!   Increasing well-being for all must be the result.  Certainly feeling lost in a thick gray fog would not be the experience of someone who was born into a family of love.

I am not talking about doctrine or dogma or rules or even about religion as most people know it.  I am talking about the essence of love, the only true Source of love — the kind of love that is linked to faith, yes, but is also life itself as we have each been gifted with it.

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GOD LOVE

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My coffee pot broke this morning one last time.  Plastic.  Sometimes I hate it!  Last time it broke I taped it back together again with metal tape.  No hope for it today.

House is cold, can’t heat what I am not using.  Good thing I bought a giant drapery at the thrift store weeks ago thinking, “Someday this will be useful.”  Today it was.

Good thing I hung onto those curtain hooks.  “Someday I will need them.”  Today I did.

Curtain rod so I could put up the drapery to close off my living/craft/music/sitting/living room?  I needed a pole 76″ long.  OK, I found one.  Never mind it has an iron rock rake head an ingenious Mexican man pounded onto it long ago so well I cannot remove it.  Today it’s my curtain rod.

Never mind those at risk outdoor hose bibs subject to tonight’s freeze.  Nothing a fist full of raw sheep wool and some cut rags can’t fix (I hope).

Let’s also hear applause for the broken old dishes retrieved from a long closed town dump.  They now grace a wall in mosaic.

Never mind the adobe chicken coop I built last spring for my hens.  It’s going down to 11 degrees tonight here in the high Arizona desert.  The hens want nothing to do with their coop, preferring to perch outside in their cage all night.  I have done my ingenious best.  Today I made a long line of cracked corn leading into their warm house — if they follow it.

But, we all know you can lead a hen into its coop but you cannot make it roost.

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In the over one thousand posts I have written for this blog I have never once chosen to use the word ‘psychology’ until today.  I address topics related to survivorship of severe infant-childhood trauma, abuse, neglect, maltreatment and the lifelong physiological consequences survivors live with. I use the word today carefully and with reservations.

Because it is estimated that only about 50% of our population receives the infant experience of optimal safe and secure attachment to their earliest caregivers — especially to their mother — I know this means that the other half of our population grows a body-brain conception to age two (the most critical stages of our development happen during our first 33 months of life) that has built into it some version of an insecure attachment disorder.

People with ANY attachment system built into their body-brain that is less than the optimal safe and secure pattern experience changes in their physiological development.  Until our so-called experts decide to unanimously recognize, accept and understand this fact I do not believe much of any use at all is included in the so-called ‘field of psychology’.

The operations of the Central Nervous System (CNS) (which includes the brain), of the Autonomic Nervous system (ANS) (which includes the so-called stress response), and the vagal nervous system that process all the information used by both the CNS/brain and ANS are centrally and fundamentally determined by our earliest attachment relationships during these first 33 months of our life.

Whatever we or anyone else might observe about our ‘psychology’ is secondary to what is ACTUALLY happening within our body.  What happens in our body is determined by how our early attachment relationships TOLD our body to form.  This, to me, makes the ‘field of psychology’ a peripheral study that is rarely accurate because the construction and operation of a person’s attachment system is very, very, very (if ever) included in any ‘psychological’ discussion.

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I know that the word ‘psychology’ rests in its origins upon Psyche who appeared in myth.  Psyche as a word itself originally described ‘the breath’ of life.

Today I am specifically thinking about my own book writing process about my severely abusive infant-childhood that has mysteriously come to a complete halt.  I have been patiently, prayerfully and hopefully been waiting for a solution to my ‘freezing’ problem.  I suspect that a piece of the answer I have been waiting for appeared last evening as I wrote an email to a friend of mine who was also a neighbor to my family back in the Alaskan valley where my parents homesteaded.

Suddenly as I wrote to my friend the image of the mythological figure Medusa appeared in my mind.  While it might be easy for me to know that this Medusa and her snake hair would be a reference to my severely mentally ill (probably Borderline Personality Disorder with psychotic features) abusive mother, I took another step in my awareness to be able to expand what I remember of the Medusa myth into my current writing-block situation.

As soon as a clear mythological (dramatic) allusion appears in thought, be it from the old myths of any culture or from ‘fairy tales’, I know (as Jung suggested) that some important reference has appeared from the underlying ‘psychic’ (the unconscious levels of human Psyche as per ‘psychology’) that can offer important information about ‘what is really going on’.

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As I began working my way through the first rough draft of my book toward the finalized second draft I hit a stone wall and came to a DEAD stop.  I have been immobilized.  In fact, as the Medusa myth reference would suggest, I have been TURNED INTO STONE.

Is it possible that as I worked to tell the truth about my terrible life with Mother — as I searched to apply my own rules of inner integrity toward telling the WHOLE truth — that I made a choice I have never made before?

Did I choose to no longer view the experiences I am writing about as reflections in the ‘safety’ of a mirror and instead choose to turn and for the first time in my 60-year life to face the truth where my Medusa mother stands directly at the center of all of it?

If turning to face Medusa I have been turned into stone — I know this has happened at a PSYCHOLOGICAL level.  Knowing what is ‘psychological’ versus what is physiological lets a person find very real solutions based on the facts of their life.  Ordinary ‘psychological’ speculation does NOT reveal facts.  It reveals guesses.

How do I know today that I have shown myself a new ‘organization’ of facts related to what has stopped me dead in my book-writing process?

I know because I can FEEL the truth of what I ‘was shown’ (probably by my right brain hemisphere’s sophisticated ability to communicate in IMAGES).  The inner constellation of information related to the myth of Medusa as it connects to what has happened to me as I turned one final time to each story I have written in unfinished draft form of the terrible abuse I experienced (and remember), now gives me something to consciously work with and through.

I have renewed hope that I can write this book!

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I would say the number one reason I suffered for those 18 years was not because my mother was insanely abusive to me — and therefore ‘deserves’ all the blame.  I would say the number one reason I suffered is because nobody STOPPED MOTHER.

NOBODY saw Mother for ‘what’ she was (and therefore for ‘who’ she was).

NOBODY looked directly at Mother or her actions.  NOBODY stood up to Mother.  NOBODY questioned her.  NOBODY stopped her.

EVERYONE (including my father and grandmother) only saw some reflection of Mother in a mirror — a reflection that was imagined and was a complete LIE!

I, as the survivor of her targeted severe abuse, have also never looked at Mother straight on, either.

I have never been able to TOLERATE looking at the TRUTH about what that woman did to me!

I am asking myself — for the integrity of this book and for my own integrity — to look at MOTHER as I look at the absolute truth of what I experienced — for the first time in my life —

And yes, I was completely unprepared for this ‘being turned into frozen stone’!

I was completely unprepared for being stopped dead in my writing tracks as I came so close — SO CLOSE — to telling this truth the best that I can.

Every infant-child is on a quest-full journey from birth, through their earliest years, into adulthood.  I was no exception.  How could I have been?  If nobody in the Medusa myth had quested or journeyed or traveled anywhere near Medusa nobody would have been at risk of being turned into stone if they looked at her instead of her mirrored image (in the myth seen in a magical metal shield).

But a myth is exactly that, no matter how deeply connected to human ‘psychological’ reality in the deep unconscious it might be.

I do not wish to succumb to remaining frozen-as-stone at this point in my life — or in my writing.  And yet it will take me some amount of time now (undetermined) to CHANGE my own ‘psychology’ so that I can get back to work!!  I do need to drop the mirror (denial, dissociation, forgetting) from my line of vision to tell the truth in my book.

Yes, I am ‘going where angels fear to tread’ but I know this task if possible or I would not feel impassioned to do it.  Passion is at the core of the Psyche-Eros myth — linked inseparably to wisdom and willingness.  And that myth is far more of a primary one than the myth about Medusa and her stupid, ugly, stone-turning-into head full of snakes!

I can do this.  I can stare Medusa down.

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I always feel lucky/blessed when there is a task to do that requires tools — that I actually possess.  For all the many, many moves in my adult life that have required that I pare down my belongings to a small core of things, it is always my minimal clothing, my warmest blankets, and my collection of tools that I have tried to hold onto.

Because I seem to have been born with an attraction to working with my hands, my small collection of tools relate to craft work, kitchen work and yard work.  I do often find that I don’t have QUITE the right tool for the job, but so far I have always found that if I am creative and determined enough I can do what I need/intend to do.

This morning I am thinking about my inner tool box.  Of course these inner tools are harder to name and discover than those tangible ones of wood and steel.  I think about this depression that I know I have directly because of the 18 years of debilitating infant-child abuse I suffered.  Mother’s was a comprehensive abuse toward me.  She left no possible stone unturned when it came to imprisoning me inside her OWN terrible world of hell.

Mother eroded me continually from the time I was born.  It happens that as I sort through the collection of family slides that contain the snippets of the history of my family of origin I am remembering within my body as well as within my conscious mind how different my reality was from that of my siblings.  My own inner message is that there are acceptable thoughts about this whole situation I can think about (very few of them, really) and a million thoughts I am not ‘supposed’ to think.

There is nobody here with me to monitor or control or even suggest to me which thoughts are to be sorted into which category.  I do all of this myself.  I think about how my lifelong struggle with deep depression caused by horrendous early abuse while my body-brain was forming is as much about the depression ‘that I got’ as it is about other critically important positive aspects of being alive as a human that I did NOT get.

All five of my other siblings received from Mother a sense of being special.  True, Mother didn’t possess the capacity to understand that any of her children were separate beings from her own self so that she was actually projecting GOODNESS onto my siblings just as she projected her hopeless, condemnable evil badness onto me.  But I don’t think as little people any of us knew Mother was projecting her own crap onto her children — be it good or bad.

My siblings PLEASED Mother.  I DISPLEASED Mother — no matter how desperately from the core of my being I tried not to.  Mother accepted my siblings.  Mother rejected (condemned) me.

Mother’s condemnation of me was continual and pervasive.  Her praising, ‘loving’ acceptance and pleasure with my siblings was equally as continual and pervasive.  Mother took ‘favoritism’ to a level unimagined by anyone who has not been unfortunate enough to be at the mercy of a severely ill, psychotic Borderline Personality Disorder mother.

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Where I got sadness, pain, sorrow, hopeless despair, desperation, terror, confusion and panic built into my body-brain through abusive trauma my siblings received hope, confidence, competence, play, special freedoms — my siblings had a different mother, a different father and a different childhood than I did.

I wouldn’t care at all except that what can be named ‘depression’ in my body is as much about what I grew up missing being built into my body-brain as it is about deep pain and sorrow that I don’t see ever going away in this lifetime (I am 60).  I am missing PRIDE I realized today.  For anything positive I have ever done/accomplished I might have felt a tiny passing tinge of pride in myself, but that passing sense had nothing inside of me to STICK to, to add onto, to build itself around.

I have no sense within me that I can find of any sense of ENTITLEMENT.

I look at the slide pictures of attention, affection, adoration and GLADNESS, of joy for their presence in her life that Mother felt for my five siblings.  Mother never felt those feelings for me from the moment I was born her special ‘condemned to hell evil devil’s child’.  I fought for my life, for my existence as a being separate from her with every breath I ever took.

I cannot erase that history or what it did to me physiologically as I continued to grow up in that world of hell made especially for me.

I cannot receive some kind of surgical implant that would instill inside of me any sense of entitlement that leads to a sense of confidence, competence, or full blown pride in myself or in anything I do.

These things I observe nearly like a complete outsider to my own reality of existence.  I do not allow myself to let emotions/feelings attach themselves to what I see as facts about myself in the world.  I do wonder, though, how life is for other people — including my siblings — who received love as little people that allowed them to acquire certain kinds of essential tools within their body-brain that – to me – allow them to follow along some different track through life that I can barely begin to imagine.

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I see the image in my mind that comes from memories of times I have stood barefoot on the sandy shore of an ocean as the sea water laps over my feet while it sucks sand out from under me and I sink, sink, sink — always sinking without any sense of solid rock or solid earth underneath me.

But I have other thoughts that circle around in my mind in a swirling kaleidoscopic pattern connected to all of these important issues involving my life in this body in this world.  I believe in God and I don’t think any of my siblings do.  I can’t stop my thoughts that somehow these patterns are all connected.

Is there something about my particular depth of suffering from birth-to-age-18, about my being disallowed from gaining a sense of entitlement of affection and affirmation by rights, that left me not only battling ‘depression’ (and its host of complications) but that also left me with some peculiar form of humility that has enabled me to keep my life on this material plane in a clear focus of perspective that my siblings completely missed?

Would I competently and confidently and pridefully be waltzing through my life oblivious to a different level of reality that excludes some deep level of humility that might be its opposite had I been removed from my parents at birth and raised in a so-called normal, healthy, happy, loving home?

Did I stay in touch within my soul as I grew up suffering so that I did not forget the spiritual reality that over all is a God that runs this entire show down here on earth — not I — not we humans?

As I sit outside watching the morning sun bring into full color the world I live in today I see God inside and out of everything.  I see life here as it possesses an essential, inner ability to reflect the rays of the Creator.  I sense that my abilities to manipulate anything having to do with my life — or any other life on this plane — also comes from this same Creator.

I don’t know how to live a blatant, emblazoned life of “I can do anything I want to and I have the perfect right to do it because I am me and I am special that way” and I never have.  I wonder, “Where is the balance in all of this?”  Where is the spiritual health that I believe humans are designed to best function with that allows for knowing both personal self-worth and our dependence for EVERYTHING on a loving God that created and maintains all of life in a state of mercy and grace?

I converse with myself about whether or not I would trade the awareness of human life’s dependence upon God for a limited and truly pitifully minuscule blind assumption that God does not exist at all.  Fortunately, being able to make that choice between a perhaps spiritually based deep humility and an oblivious sense of my own powerfulness seems to have been removed from me before I was ever born.

Perhaps I possess a multitude of spiritual tools that I use every instant of my life that are just not as glaring and glitzy as others’ gifts of self confidence leading to a complete disbelief in the Great Mystery some name God.

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It comes to me this morning as I watch the pale clouded sky begin to brighten with a new day’s light that any anger I might feel is not a problem.  My anger is a good sign, a sign that I have not given up the good fight against wrongful actions done by others that hurt me.  Along with my anger about what hurt me comes my anger at a society that truthfully does not place a high value on infants and children and people and other living beings.  We live in a sick materialistic mostly non-spiritual culture that is NOT healthy enough to care about what is truly important.

What I choose to do with and about my anger matters to me.  Recognizing that I am angry is my first step.  I was thinking about a rose thorn embedded in my right pointer finger.  I have been ignoring it since efforts to remove it have thus far failed.  This spot on my finger has turned into what I know could be called an ‘angry wound’.  (As small and inconsequential as this injury is, it at least allowed me to recognize a bigger picture.)

Survivors of human-caused abusive traumas are often left with angry wounds.  In the case of infant-child abuse, society contributes to the abuse by not caring enough to notice when it happens, not caring enough to adequately intervene, and by not caring enough as a society to provide the MEDICINE that is needed to help heal the angry wounds carried by survivors.

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I turned to my first aid kit this morning for a home remedy salve made for me by a New Mexican sheep rancher’s wife 15 years ago.  The salve is on my finger now, held in place by a simple item known as a band aid.  It isn’t the band aid that is going to draw the infection out of my injury.  It is this stinky medicine that will both draw the infection and the thorn itself to the surface so that my finger can heal.

I am reminded that I live now in the same uncaring society that allowed those 18 years of severe abuse to happen to me in the first place.  This sick society has not changed.  This is the same society that contributed its share to the injuries from the abuse I suffered in the first place.  It is the same sick society that does not provide for trauma abuse survivors the kind of care toward healing that would be required to heal these deep angry wounds.  I – and most other survivors — are left as alone in trying to heal our deep wounds as we were left alone to survive them in the first place.

I work to turn my anger at injustice into understanding based on truth and fact.  I work to ground my reality in the bigger picture of an evolving humanity that is still a long way from its maturity.  I will bide my time in this lifetime, but I will not live long enough to see the dawning of a truly healthy, spiritual united humanity that understands under God that we are to love and care for one another and for all life as if well-being for all is what truly matters.

In the bigger picture none of us actually live in our body on this earth for very long, and when our soul’s connection with this material world is severed and when our soul then travels to the infinite other worlds of Creation, all will be held accountable to God.  I am no more an exception to this fact that my abusive mother was.  Through her sickness Mother contributed a great deal of harm.  I am grateful that I do not have her sickness.  I can choose to contribute something good.  And if part of that goodness involves anger against actions that are evil and hurt innocents, so be it.

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Work went along smoothly on the slides once my friend came out today to help me.  We certainly did not get through all of them this time around, but at least I could stomach the job for 2 or 3 hours.

Now I will have to continue this task alone.  I feel bleak.  And I feel ANGRY as I visually take in just a little more information about what such a terribly painful childhood can look like when snippets of it are captured on film through the eye of the camera held by Mother, my abuser.

I do not grant myself permission to feel anger about what happened to me, and I never have.

A long time ago when I sought my first outside assistance for my troubles as an adult (31 years ago when I was 29), I was told that depression was ‘anger turned inward’.  I know now that was an extremely simplistic statement, but it at least is a start at recognizing that anger and sadness are linked to one another.

I see picture after picture of group shots of my siblings happy together with me left out of the picture.  I see entire rolls of film devoted to birthday celebrations for them.  I tell myself on some level that none of what happened to me MATTERS!  If it didn’t matter to anyone else, why should it matter to me?

Such a sense of unreality comes if I begin to know my own truth.  It seems much ‘better’ to try to simply accept somebody else’s version of what happened during those 18 years with a vicious mad woman for a mother.  Forget about Linda.  Forget about everything except the fact that I survived.  Isn’t that all that matters?  That all six of us siblings survived?

How nice it would have been if someone had told me anywhere along the way that the aftermath of that kind of childhood trauma would affect every single decision I made in my blindness leaving that hell of a home of origin.  EVERY decision, every thought and feeling I had about myself and about others.  How nice it would have been if someone would have told me that I was fundamentally and absolutely sculpted as a human being by that abuse.

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As my friend and I worked through jumbled piles of slides today I was struck many times by the stories those slides reflect.  Can I somehow reach a platform of objectivity that will allow me to truthfully tell the stories WITHOUT my having to be engaged emotionally with their content as I write them?

And if I do experience emotions as I do this work, can I allow myself to feel angry?  I see reminders of the pampered affections and attentions given to my other siblings while I was hidden away somewhere isolated and abused.  How do I think I stood the same chance as they had/have for a happy fulfilled life given all the favoritism shown to them against all the tortured horror shown to me for 18 long years?

No, life is NOT fair.  My whole life could have been a whole lot worse — but so what?  And not only my life, but, yes, the lives of my siblings could have been a whole lot BETTER!  It is all done.  It is all in the past.  Or is it?

That abuse began the instant I was born.  It’s not like there was EVER a moment Mother’s psychotic belief in my hopeless evilness didn’t color every moment of my life in those 18 years.  If the abuse had started when I was two, even, I would not carry the traumatic changes that early stress created in my physiology that I suffer from today.

So – if it does no good to talk about ‘it’ — all we survivors from infant-childhoods in hell should just be good boys and girls and keep our mouths shut?  How is anyone going to learn a thing about what abuse feels like so that as a society we care enough to STOP IT if nobody speaks the truth?

Ignoring infant-child abuse lets it continue.  It is the mute inner silence of myself during those first 18 years and my own mute inner silence about so much of that abuse now that angers me most.  The message from our culture is that if nobody else cares about child abuse, then the victim better not dare to care, either.  We are to pretend it never happened, that it doesn’t happen, that it does not damage a survivor in critical ways for the rest of their lifespan, and that infant-child abuse doesn’t really happen NOW.

I will NOT pretend it never happened, and I will NOT pretend it isn’t happening to thousands upon thousands of infants and children today.

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Post from earlier today:  +ON THE SLIM CHANCE I WILL FEEL BETTER

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Today a friend is coming to help me with a project that needs to be done for many reasons.  This is a task that I cannot do alone, also for many reasons.  I am wondering at this moment how I will feel once this afternoon has passed and all these family history slides are sorted, titled, dated and organized.

This friend of mine is very jovial, pleasant and happy.  I hope that with his help this task that daunts me will not seem so ugly or so overwhelming.  In so many ways at this point in my life I wish all memory of the first 18 years of my life spent under the constant stress of abuse by my mother could be completely erased.  I no longer want any trace of it — not even a memory of the Alaskan homesteading experience.  I want it ALL gone!

I made it so close to completing the writing of my childhood story up to my age 10 1/2.  I completed the first rough draft.  I was totally unprepared for what happened to me as I began to edit this draft for the second – and nearly final – one.  I find I cannot do it!!

This collection of slides that lie in a disordered heap under a sheet on the table in my front room contains the visual record of the story of my childhood — minus the abuse, of course, which only appears in traces by my absence from so many photographs of my siblings.  The abuse I suffered also appears in my body language and placement in relation to the rest of my family in many pictures I do at least show up in.

In many ways I feel I got left holding the ‘bag’, and it’s a BIG one!  Being the child ‘chosen’ as the target of Mother’s insane abuse left me with nobody to share my experience with.  I still feel that way.  The numbers of children who suffer the kind of infant-child abuse I did is so small our stories are recording in books like “Sybil” and “Mommy Dearest.”

We have freak stories to tell.  And as I work to tell mine I feel again as I did as a child — absolutely alone in a reality that exists to NOBODY ELSE.

I ask God every day to show me any point at all in my proceeding forward with my writing task.  Today my friend and I will at least make progress in ordering the disorganized mess this pile of slides IS as these pictures portray the mess that is the history of the Lloyd family — especially my history.

I never chose my childhood.  I never chose my position or role in my family of origin.  In some ways I am enraged I did the suffering that allowed my siblings to get off ‘Scott free’ — other than the fact that they witnessed what was done to me — as they went right on playing (as kids SHOULD be able to do).  Other than the fact also, to be fair, that our mother was an advanced Borderline Personality Disorder mad woman which made all of our lives nuts.  But because I did the suffering for everyone else my other five siblings escaped the unnameable torture that was MY childhood.

Who cares?

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